Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism

Abstract

Historical revisionism towards the Yugoslavian experience of real socialism is gaining ground in Croatia and Slovenia, as exemplified, for example, by the 2017 renaming of Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square and similar cases in Šibenik or Karlovac, as well as parallel developments in Ljubljana. However, the spaces that once represented the Yugoslavian workers’ movement and the anti-fascist struggle can be also subject to nostalgic practices termed Titostalgia. This study employs an analysis inspired by a discourse-historical approach to scrutinize the arguments used in naming controversies in nine Croatian and Slovenian localities from 2011 to 2022. The investigation of semiotic landscapes draws from extensive fieldwork, including photographic documentation consisting of 1,658 images. Dystopian interpretations of Yugoslavia’s past turn out to be propagated through top–down discourses, circulating in media outlets and endorsed by local authorities through infrastructural signage. These discourses are typically initiated by civil society actors aligned with right and far right politics. Besides mild media opposition, which mainly invokes anti-fascist values, smaller urban centres exhibit passive resistance or inertia towards the renaming, observable in grassroots signage. Conversely, capital cities emerge as hubs of intense expressive and predominantly progressive ideological semiotic practices within the renamed spaces.